These are the future, my friends. They’re here and living among us. They’re not very interested in us, and I’m not sure I blame them. The best we can hope for is that one day they may keep us as pets.
This article via David Warlick via Ewan is dealing more with the irrelevance of today’s newspapers but substitute the word newspaper for school and editor to teacher and it’s pretty telling.
They buy music from the iTunes store - but continue to download tracks illicitly as well. They use BitTorrent to get US editions of Lost. They think ‘Google’ is a synonym for ‘research’ and regard it as quite normal to maintain and read blogs (55 million as of last night), use Skype to talk to their mates and upload photos to Flickr. Some even write entries on Wikipedia. And they know how to use iMovie or Adobe Premiere to edit videos and upload them to YouTube.
Now look round the average
British newsroom(staff room). How many hacks have a Flickr account or a MySpace profile? How many sub-editors (teachers) have ever uploaded a video to YouTube? How many editors (teachers) have used BitTorrent? (How many know what BitTorrent is?)
Looks like Prensky material. We’ve got a long way to go. It’s noteworthy that the business world, the traditional newspaper is realizing that they are missing a critical demographic. But for them, it’s only one demographic. For us, it’s our only demographic.
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November 13th, 2006 at 6:11 pm
And despite this we really see glacial change. There are technological hurdles related to infrastructure. The “highways” are not as well paved as we might like along the internet. Mostly I think the problem lies with an oddly conservative mindset about necessary skills in our field: “Sure they can Google and play with software, but they can’t take notes or spell!” The rate of change is so dramatic that it leaves teachers heads spinning. Will the technology advance so quickly that teachers can’t keep up?
But that surely misses the point. We do not have to “keep up” with them in the sense of mastering all of the new variations on multimedia communication as they do. Let them demonstrate their ideas through these media. If what they present fails to communicate anything of substance then do what teachers have done for some centuries… ask them to try and explain it again. We need to open the door to alternate forms of communication and suppress our discomfort.
November 13th, 2006 at 7:50 pm
Well said Alan. The point that hits me is that teachers don’t know about these technologies or if they do, don’t see them as relevant.
I recall a music teacher I had in the late 70’s using pop music. It was a hook for many of us and although many would have questioned the musical integrity, she was as interested in our musical development regardless of the style.
As you say, our job is to help them create and understand things that are substantive.